Carrie Coon has been surprising us with her acting chops for a long time – ever since she suddenly appeared in Gone Girl as the sister of Ben Affleck in 2014, and at the same time became a key part of the success of The Leftovers, in which she played a woman who had lost her whole family in a strange global event. She had been preparing for a long time in the theater for that big debut on the screen: she received a nomination for a Tony for her work on Broadway in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? where she also met her husband, Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Letts. In a recent interview about her work for The Nest, in which she plays opposite Jude Law, Coon surprised us by telling the HFPA about her BA in Spanish which she pursued because, when she was very young, her parents adopted a little girl from El Salvador: Coon later went to Central America to work at the orphanage where her adopted sister had come from. We wanted to know more about it, so we spent several minutes on the phone learning about her connection to Spanish, her travels and her love of soccer.

How did your interest in the Spanish language start?

I grew up in Ohio, in a small town outside of Akron. My father almost became a Catholic priest: he had attended a seminar in Cleveland although he didn’t get ordained.  Instead, he married my mother and they had my brother and myself: this was in the early 1980s. They decided they were willing to adopt a third child – they had always talked about the possibility of adopting, it was just something that they were interested in doing. They tried to adopt domestically, but they weren’t allowed, because they already had two children. So they ended up hooking up with an organization called Concern for Children: they found it through some friends of theirs, Gretchen and Pat Kennedy, who had adopted several children from El Salvador, which of course was at the time in the middle of a civil war. Concern for Children had a connection with a judge in El Salvador, who was helping to expedite the adoption of children who had been orphaned by the war. My parents ended up going down there in July of 1983 to pick up my sister, who was 4 at the time, and bring her back home to live with us. That was a very dangerous time in El Salvador. The U.S. Embassy had just been bombed, Romero had been assassinated a few years before, and four nuns had been murdered by the paramilitary forces, so it was bit terrifying. My father was in the Air Force, and had brought some medicine for the orphanage – it was a pretty intimidating trip.  But they brought my sister home – she was 4 and I was 3, and so we grew up together. Afterwards, my parents had two more kids, so my sister was the only adopted child of five. 

Do you have memories of that first encounter that you had with your sister?

I do. I remember being very excited to get a sister. We were actually taken to the airport, because at the time, of course, you could greet people at the gate.  My sister seemed very tranquil and very sort of joyful and happy to be around us, but she didn’t really speak very much. My parents got some children’s English/Spanish books in an effort to be able to say things like “Are you hungry?” and “I love you,” so we learned a little bit of Spanish. But in fact, after several weeks of listening, like most children of her age, she just started speaking English quickly, because that’s when a child’s brain is most hardwired to learn languages. And then she promptly forgot Spanish, and never really recovered her ability or her interest in it.  It was interesting that I went on to study Spanish after middle school, and I went to study Spanish in College, but that was not an interest we shared.

And then you went to El Salvador…

Yes, I ended up going there in the year 2000, along with Concern for Children, and I went to my sister’s orphanage in Santa Tecla. We did a little bit of work around the orphanage, painting and spending time with the kids, and just helping out with cosmetic things in the building.  But the most interesting part was to watch the young people I traveled with, who had been adopted around the same time as my sister: they had memories, and some of them were able to meet their families, and that was really extraordinary. Then I went back when I was in college: I was an English and Spanish Literature major, and I ended up doing my thesis in Spanish. My focus in the thesis was on Latin American Revolutionary poets, because of my interest in Archbishop Romero and the rise of the Liberation Theology in Latin America: that was really important for me, because, although I had been raised Catholic in terms of religion, I had always been more drawn to the revolutionary spirit in the church. I loved the idea that the church has responsibility to uplift the oppressed population, not just after death, but also while they are alive, and so I was drawn to investigating what is the church’s role in supporting the impoverished classes, to help them attain liberation in their lifetime, not in the afterlife. We actually did a trip with my university for a class called Social Responsibility: we went down to El Salvador to work with the Salvadoran Association for Rural Health, who do a lot of important work in the rural areas. We went and helped bring some latrines and composting posts outside of Santa Ana, where I was exposed to the very real facts of what the American government is partially responsible for there. The Carter and Reagan administrations contributed one to two million dollars a day to suppress that revolution: in fact, at the end of the Civil War, there were some high level members of the U.S. Military that really were making decisions in the country. So we bear a tremendous amount of responsibility for the poverty that still persists, and for the reason why we have so many immigrants who are trying to gain amnesty here in the United States because of the situation they are fleeing. The idea that we will not take responsibility, certainly for this current administration’s attitude towards immigration, does not reflect a sense of history. That’s always been an important part of my worldview.

At one point, you thought about being a linguist. Could you imagine an alternate life for yourself outside of acting?

I really could. I think one of the gifts of having my sister and having been invited into this other world of Spanish culture and El Salvador, was that it gave me such a sense of the world at a very young age. I was fortunate enough to be able to travel to these places and see a much bigger world than my own. I think one of the issues you see in America right now, is that so many of the choices we have made about policy, or about the last election of 2016, have sprung from fear. Because we are afraid of the things we don’t understand, we are afraid of what is different from us. I am very grateful to my parents for encouraging me to travel and experience a world that was much bigger than the one I had been raised in, a world that I love and appreciate. I have come to understand how extraordinary the world outside of mine is, and for that reason, I know that if I were not an actor, there would still be plenty for me to do and there are plenty of areas for me to get involved in. I feel that I still work in language anyway – acting is very much rooted in language. If I had an opportunity, I would love to continue to teach voice work or even dialect work, which would be really interesting for me. If I were to have another career, I think it might be rooted in helping people sort of breathe and find their voices and find their resonance, or in helping performers and actors do dialect work.  I think helping people finding their voices, whether it’s politically or physically, would be something that would be really tied to those opportunities I had as a younger person to meet with other cultures, and just realize that there is more out there than what you already know.

I see a connection between your getting into a different world physically, and your work as an actor, because you’re basically doing the same thing – you enter different worlds every time you take on a new character.  Do you see that parallel?

Yes, I think that is a really beautiful connection to make – I hadn’t quite put it together in that way.  And yeah, I think you are absolutely right, because, ultimately, what both of these ideas are about, is compassion. And the thing about compassion is, there’s nothing finite about it, the more exposed you are to the lives and struggles of other people, the more of it you have. That’s not to pat myself on the back, I think that’s just human nature. It’s the kind of exercise that you can perform in the real world, or you can do it through an active imagination. And that’s absolutely what actors do – they sort of enter into a world imaginatively, and try to create in it a space for a different experience from their own, and sort of discover what is closest to them about it and what is furthest away, and how far we can all stretch ourselves to meet that thing that is far from us. That’s why I am an advocate for young people to go traveling, to go study abroad, for young people to go on work trips, like the one I got to go on in Santa Ana. My small college in Ohio still takes a group of students on trips, usually in Latin America. There is a class called Social Responsibility and I have personally taken on the responsibility of helping to fund those trips because I know it was so formative for me and so critical for students – especially those coming from rural areas like mine – to be exposed to the world.

Do you watch soccer these days? 

Oh my gosh, well what is so sad is that now I have a toddler (laughs), I don’t get to watch anything.  But it’s funny, my brother likes to gamble, and he is really into gambling on soccer – just as he is his on other sports (laughs) – so I have to share his passion a little bit, but now that I have been, frankly, so busy, I don’t get to watch anything anymore. However, I am actually involved with a soccer organization in Chicago, the Edgewater Castle Team: we are trying to move up into the pro-leagues, but what the team also provides is access for our refugee and immigrant populations to a free soccer league, so through it we are helping to unite our refugee and immigrant communities in Chicago by means of this shared passion of soccer.  I am actually a partial owner of the team and I am on the board, so I help to advocate for support for this soccer league.  Soccer is such a great ground for people to meet. I think so often organizations in big cities provide the sort of more fundamental support for refugee immigrant populations, like food, and shelter, and job training, but sometimes what’s missing is joy and quality of life, and what I love about this soccer team is that we are inviting people to celebrate life in a way that can be really challenging when you’ve just moved to a new place and are meeting people from all over the world.